Edna St. Vincent Millay was also quite a scandal in her time. She was an admitted bisexual* who carried on numerous affairs with both men and women throughout the roaring twenties. Many of her poems were considered shockingly homo-erotic and very feminist. When she finally did marry, a man named Eugen Boissevain, many of her fans thought she had sold out. (see also: Ani Difranco, Gloria Steinem) She was as wild as ever, though, and she and her husband agreed to an open marriage, "living more as great friends than as husband and wife."

She died of heart failure in 1950 at her home in Austerlitz, New York.

Though most famous for her poems, she also wrote an opera libretto and fiction under the pseudonym of Nancy Boyd.


* From Great Companions by Max Eastman:

While at a cocktail party Millay discussed her recurrent headaches with a psychologist. He asked her, "I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that you might perhaps, although you are hardly conscious of it, have an occasional impulse toward a person of your own sex?" She responded, "Oh, you mean I'm homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual, too, but what's that got to do with my headache?"